Mozmin
Mastan
Professor Williams
English 1A
03/07/14
Waiting to be Saved
Merriam
Webster’s Dictionary defines education as: “The
knowledge, skill, and understanding that you get from attending a school,
college, or university.” Looking back at your years in school can you really
say that all the skills you learned are skills you use every day? The truth is
that our education system is not as good as most people think. In school you
are taught only one way. You are taught to retain the skills that your teacher
has taught and not to question it because your teach is “always right.” We are
all human and even teachers make mistakes. We don’t learn to question anything
anymore; we just blindly accept that this person who holds a degree is going to
be right. We have no idea if our teacher cheated in school to get their degree
or actually work hard for it. In school the students never ask question like
why is that the answer? Or how is that true? We automatically assume that if it
is written in a textbook it is always correct. Students should be explained why
the sky is blue or why 2 plus 2 is equal to 4. In this way school is
interesting to most students anymore. Some students cannot focus in class
because they have had a tramatizing experaince either inside or outside of
school but no teachers take the time to discuss it. Also students start to fall
asleep and text in class because the class they are in is to
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“boring.”
If the students were taught in a way that was both fun and knowledgeable it
would fit the criteria quite well. The education board would be happy that all
the concepts are being learned and that the students are also having a good
time.
The
baking method in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed says that the teachers are the subjects of a classroom and that the
students are just passive objects in the classroom. This means
that the teacher is the superior one in the classroom and the students are just
sitting there passively accepting knowledge. For some children this way helps
them learn, but for other children they cannot learn by blatantly accepting
pieces of information. Everyone has different types of ways they learn. Some
people are auditory learners while some people are visual learners. Teachers
should incorporate different types of learning into their curriculum instead of
just teaching only one way. You would think that if our education system is not
working for most students that they would change it to something better.
Teachers
are told what materials they need to cover every year. They are limited to
teaching only what they are assigned to teach. If teachers were able to teach
what they think is important rather then silly memorization then more students
would be able to grasp knowledge faster. Teachers have been though the right
training and have the knowledge to determine what information will be critical
to the student future. If a student could connect something they learned in
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school
to what they want to be in the future or even connect to what they already know
it might make them eager to learn more. When something is interesting to
someone you can tell because they start to enjoy the subject and take time out
to do their own kind of research. It goes to say when you are having a good
time you acquire more skills.
A
job is sometimes just a job. Teachers are being paid to teach their students
weather they show up or not. If a student fails the teacher doesn’t get
penalized for it. Life keeps going on for them. If teachers wanted they could
just have students doing their own work out of a textbook all year with out
teaching them anything. There is no incentive to teachers. Maybe if how many
kids passed determined how the teachers were paid they would put more effort
into teaching them in new ways. In America teachers don’t make as much money as
doctors and lawyers. In other countries being a teacher is the highest paying
job because education is so important. It is the teacher’s job to improve the
mind of students and push them to expand their learning. Kids are the future
and how they get educated can change how we even live Look at Bill Gates, what
if he didn’t get a good education. He would not have made Microsoft and changed
the world. Some people say, “What I the cure for cancer was trapped in the mind
of someone who didn’t get a good education?” With out that one person who could
have changed the world we would loose so much. If everyone got a good and fair
education we would never even second-guess if anyone else could have had the
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answer
but never had the opportunity to expand on it. Having knowledge is very
powerful.
In the olden days not a lot of people knew how to read. The people who
actually knew how to read would read the bible and say that these facts are Gods
words. But if you didn’t know how to read you would just have to accept the
face that the literate people knew what they were talking about and listen.
Because of this the illiterate people were taken advantage of. No one wanted to
teach the illiterate people how to read because they would then realize that they
were lied to. You can relate this with school. The students do not know first
hand about the world so teachers fills their heads with information of how the
world is supposed to be. We have never been to Antarctica but everyone knows
that it is really cold there all the time. What in Antarctica was a dessert? We
wouldn’t know because we have never been there and everyone will tell you that
you shouldn’t go because it is way to cold. We don’t know from a shadow of
unreasonable doubt that it is really cold there we just know because that’s how
we were taught. We were taught that on a map that white means it is really cold
there so when we look at the map of Antarctica we assume that the color is
there for a reason and it is cold. If we don’t question things on why they are
so we can never really be sure about anything. And if we are not sure about
anything how are we suppose to gasp this so called, “Education” that everyone
so desperately wants. They sure aren’t just going to hand it to us.
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America has always been about money. If you have money you can afford
fancy things. But what happens to people who are not wealthy? People who are poor
cannot afford to go to fancy schools that have real quality teachers and
supplies. This is a country were every man is for themselves. There is no
support for any of the lower class. If you are poor you go to poor schools, get
a poor education, and get a poor job. And then the cycle starts every next
generation after. You can work you self all your life but still not get
anywhere because you cannot afford it. Your parents can’t afford to take you to
school everyday because they are always at their first, second, or their job.
And when you don’t go to school you loose vital information that you could have
attained if you were there in the first place. It is true when people say you
get what you paid for.
One
thing that is different when you compare good “rich” school with “poor” school
is that the school is the mostly poor communities have more violence. Violence
in communities makes people feel very sad and no teacher takes the time out to
explain what happened and what you can do in order to prevent yourselves from
being like that. If teachers were to take a section of class out to explain and
also see how everyone is feeling rather than just going with the lesson as if
nothing happened, the students would feel a little calmer. Jeff Duncan-Andrade
says, “Everybody knows the violence that is happening in communities and every
day it is just business as usual.” In mostly rich school if there was a
traumatizing even there would be explanations on what happened and even the
school could shut down for a day so all the students could grieve. If
we see
so many acts of violence in our communities it can change the way one looks at
their selves. Some people can say, well if everyone is getting killed out here
what am I doing wasting my time with an education? If I could be making money
selling drugs what am I doing here in school? If we want our students to be
attentive we have to acknowledge their hardship and help them realize that in
order to move on and get out of this community is if you work hard and go to
school.
All
our experience makes us who we are. In order to move to the future you have to
let go of the past. We have always had just one way of teaching and we want to
hold on to it so bad because it’s the only thing we know and we are scared of
taking a chance on something new. You can eat something every single day
because it is all you ever ate but if that same food isn’t making you full
anymore you need to change what you eat. It is never a wrong time to change.
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